In a candid conversation, two hosts and Mike Oppenheim (not that one) navigate topics from nostalgic childhood drills to the anxieties of modern active shooter preparedness. They delve into the evolving landscape of art and entertainment in the digital age, lamenting the decline of focused attention. Mike shares his personal journey as a diverse artist grappling with the challenges of capitalism and the rise of AI, prompting a broader discussion on societal shifts, unrealized potential, and the growing sense of disconnect. Despite these concerns, they find a measure of optimism in the cyclical nature of change, suggesting that current anxieties surrounding technology may eventually lead to unforeseen improvements.
Bad AI Transcript
Hey, everybody, and welcome to a conversation with Mike Oppenheim. Did I say that right? You did. Okay. Usually you go by Mike Oppie, and so you make it easier on everybody to not have to have the last part, which is the more confusing part. I think everybody can do Opp, but it’s the Oppenheim part that is difficult. Now, were you inundated with information during the whole Barbie Oppenheimer thing? Well, so when I was a little kid, I grew up in California in the Bay Area, which is like famously in Berkeley, there’s signs that say like nuclear free zone and stuff. And I, like the idiot I was as a little kid, saw that this guy who was associated with the atomic bomb had my name. I mean, I willfully ignored the ER at the end, which is not my name. And so I told everyone at school as like a little kid that I was related to him.
And the teacher was horrified at me, and I didn’t understand it. And then they didn’t call my parents in. It wasn’t this dramatic.
as a kid, it felt dramatic. And they basically sorted things out, and I was told, you’re not related to the guy. And then I was told, you also might not want to be related to the guy. He was associated with communism and disgrace. And then the rest of my life, up until the movie release, was a lot of people saying, oh, Oppenheimer, are you related? And I’d say, no, no, no, there’s no E-R at the end. So I would be correcting them. But then I did some research on him, and he’s a really great guy. He actually did some great things. And the movie tries to capture that, but he was kind of pinned for something he wasn’t really doing. It’s funny, because I was just being silly, but I thought maybe you probably did. But it’s amazing that people forget the last part of the name. Yeah. You know, like, I guess…
What would you say? Oppenheim would be the name and then Oppenheimer would be of Oppenheim, perhaps. Yes, I think so. Oppenheim is a town in Germany. I know that. So that’s interesting. But I figured just because of the first part that people would probably ask you a bunch of questions, even though that’s not really your name. But it’s funny that you had a story about how you thought, oh, yeah, I’ll be… I’ll be Oppenheimer, sure. What the heck, right? It’s cool. He made the bomb, right? Yeah, yeah, big bomb. And, you know, it’s now 2025. We teach history very differently. This is like in the 1980s. We were still in a Cold War with Russia, so we were pretty braggadocious about it. Right, well, yeah. So, yeah, in the 80s, exactly. Did you have to go through the nuclear drills? Do you remember these at all? Yeah, me too. Oh, my gosh. It sounds so ridiculous when you…
When you’re a kid, you just kind of go along with everything. Yeah, I’ll get under my desk when the nuclear bomb goes off. Now you’re like, what’s the point? It’s idiotic, right? I mean, I think the whole idea behind that was just to make everybody feel better maybe, even though what everybody was being asked to do was really quite ridiculous. Yeah, and I liken it in a completely opposite way too. I have been told I have young children, so they have not yet been – taught this but they do active shooter drills in schools now yes oh gosh yes and to me i’m liking it because i’m saying it’s actually the polar opposite to me you’re introducing a concept to children hey other kids have done this and will do this and b it’s just like i don’t know i don’t like it i would rather not have a drill i would rather not talk about it and i would rather just if and when it happens but you know yeah that’s the weird thing. So the funny, if you.
I’m not studying on these kind of things, but I would say lightly taking in the information is there have been school shootings forever. It’s just now it seems to be… Well, now because we have more people, there’s more of them. And I think it’s a bit of a… statistical thing, right? So because there’s more people, then you have more of this other behavior and so forth. But as far as active shooter drills is something that my kids had to go through. And yeah, I wasn’t all happy about it either. But you’re right. It’s probably better to be somewhat prepared. And I guess that’s probably the logic from the nuclear drills either is to try to be to at least you’re addressing an issue, even if you’re
solution isn’t always the best solution um you know, because the reality with the active shooter, not to be a downer, but his bullets go through walls uh so i mean our schools aren’t built of of uh you know kevlar and um you know, just because you you barricade the door doesn’t mean that uh something’s not going to get into that room um it’s just less likely to be as deliberate possibly um So, yeah. But, yeah, we don’t want to tell the kids about that uh stuff hopefully there’s no no kids are listening to this about my yeah talk about that what’s funny uh my introduction to school shootings was actually in uh 91 the phenomenally popular song jeremy by pearl jam in the video yeah yeah and it tells the story of a kid who goes to school and he speaks in class today and it’s a reference to him shooting, I think, one or two classmates. And it’s a very gory, bloody video and i don’t even think
there’s a chance in heck that it could be released nowadays. It probably would never pass, you know? Right. Nowadays that we would probably wouldn’t, although there’s not many music videos anymore, which is kind of sad. I was just thinking about that. I just was, I had seen something. Oh, actually I was, I was on my fire TV. I was watching something. And then one of the ads was spot, check out the latest music videos. So I clicked on it and it, it did play music videos, but I was, it, it just kind of, made me a little bit sad because, you know, you talk about the 80s. Back in the 80s with mtv and everything, we had music videos and it was it was the content. It wasn’t the background right and and then like that, like you mentioned the jeremy song, that was, you know, something that was uh very powerful at the time because it had everybody’s attention because you were, it wasn’t you just put it on and cleaned your house and you had these things going on.
you actually, you know, we’re sitting there paying attention and, and the, the videos got more and more complex, uh, after they got going, you know, the, what was it? 83 was MTV. I’m thinking. Yeah. And so the first videos were very quite simple. And then by the time you get to the nineties, I mean, they’re incredibly, they’re storytelling, right? There’s a lot of stuff going on and it got really complicated and, and more interesting and so forth and now i think we’re back uh because the one that i watched was a k-pop thing uh apt i think it’s the name of the song anyway it’s very simple it’s just people dancing around on a sound stage singing the song and and it had some graphics and things but it was more like the original it was more like you know flock of seagulls uh standing around
I’m still thinking about them. Yeah. The Bengals walk like an Egyptian just because I was a little boy and I was like, oh, these are like the most beautiful women in the history of the world. Like I remember, like, and this is pretty pubescent. So it’s like very innocent, you know, it’s just like. Right. And then also like as a kid in the 80s thinking adults wear like headbands and like long dangles, you know, just like all the style choices were like fascinating. Yeah. A little bit out there, right? I do. When you look back. Yeah. I like that you brought it up just because I do feel like this sadness about the attention span in our culture. And it’s not like that I care about an individual’s attention span, but I really am sad that like television shows are made for people holding a phone in their hand and barely watching it. Like movies are come out at home and people are like walking and leaving, you know, it’s just like, cause like, yeah, like art is like consumed with your full attention. It has a profound effect on you. And I’ve been testing it. I’ve been watching it.
old daniel day lewis movies and i’ve been putting my phone away and it’s like actually hard i’m 43 and it’s hard for me and i didn’t throw it away and every once in a while in the first 10 20 minutes i’ll look at my phone with like this sense of like well this movie is not so exciting that i could like not turn and look at something but i know if i do that i’m gonna lose something and so yeah i don’t know um yeah well the hill but yeah it’s it is weird like that though, because you’re looking, you’re looking for, you get these blips of, of entertainment rather than getting like a full thing. And it, and you know, we’re, we’re turning a corner here, Mike, I don’t know if you realize, but I’m sure you do. The AI is going to change the way that we look at things because it’s, it’s not the same collaborative thing. So I look at it. So if, if,
if we want to elevate ourselves a little bit here, Mike, and say what we’re doing here is a bit of art, right? So we’re having a conversation, and it’s cached in the podcast light and so forth, and you and I are talking, and so we’re interacting, and we’re having this free-flowing. None of this was planned, and we’re bringing the best of ourselves to this moment, whereas AI, You know, you just go, I want to see a picture of a crab crawling across the beach that gets ate by a shark. You know what I mean? And there’s no collaboration. There’s no… And then the heavy lifting all gets done by the computer. I think it’s going to… Right now, it’s not, you know… There’s a lot of interesting things, and they’re only interesting because they’ve never been done before. And I hope…
as we move forward, that it’s going to become more of a collaborative process than just one person throwing out random thoughts. But we’ll see. I mean, and then that gets taken in. I mean, I’ll sit there and I mean, everybody, there’s a group and I can’t remember the name of them right now that is doing all of these movie trailers for really, really popular movies in different styles, right? So I watched one Star Wars if it was made in the 50s. Right? That’s cool. Yeah. And I mean, it’s on and on. You name a really popular franchise, they’ve probably done something. And it really is interesting. And it’s all AI generated and so forth. But it’s like, you know, is that… Now we’re getting into these weird esoteric corners, right? Is that art? Or is that just… Is that more of…
you know, before in my mind, I would go, Oh, I wonder what star Wars would look like in the fifties. And then in my mind, it would all happen. Right. And I can’t bring that forward. You know, at the, at that point in time, you could not bring that idea forward easily. Um, and now you can. And so where were we at? What’s your thoughts on all this? I have, I have so many thoughts and it actually segues into like the most awkward, uh, feeling i have as of late, which is like, as is below my name here on this visual podcast i i have a website and on that website, I write things, I do podcasts, I do original music and music videos. And my point is that i’m an artist of like all trades i i do like almost every form of art and i’m also trying to make money, but i also see my competition and what they’re doing to both make money or to like promote. And it, um,
it turns me off all of it to the point where I’m turned off about my own. And then it just makes me every time I want to quit, like I literally just want to pull the rug and just say, forget it. I, I don’t. And the reason I don’t is because Franz Kafka wrote and then thought his friend was going to burn his work and he didn’t. And it made a difference. And so I just know that I’m a human with a real heart who wants to make a difference. And so I do all this art. I also live in this hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper, peak capitalism era of America where I’m watching the foundation shake at the very least, if not maybe come down. I’m not terrified so much as I am questioning myself and other artists to really think about don’t have an issue with charging money for things. No artist should feel like it’s not okay to ask money for art, but to expect a society to have reverence for this many people who want to be artists…
Is actually absurd, including myself and it’s so it’s very, it’s humbling and a little bit humiliating for me to like Do all this math because when I was started my first band in like the year 1999-2000 it was such a different landscape. The competition was clear. It was like everyone and their mother wants to play guitar and be in a band, But very few people actually get their ass together, practice enough to do it like it wasn’t so like just the sheer, level of like hey me and my four friends actually practice every single day of the week have all these songs memorized we can play them without making mistakes and their original was like enough to get into like venues and we were like touring and not making money but again it was like a respect driven thing and now i just i cringe and feel bad for like all musicians because no one wants to go to a live event anyway so you might as well just throw it up on the internet right yeah well yeah um
like, ruined a lot of things. I mean, and I don’t understand. I don’t want to get off the AI topic, but just a real quick aside on the COVID thing. I don’t understand how that happened, to be honest with you. Because, you know, when I was young, the whole idea was to go do things, go places, go, you know, experience stuff, right? And you’d meet up with your friends, even if you weren’t didn’t have an agenda, didn’t have a plan, you’d meet up and you’d go, what do you want to do? And then you’d go do something, right? And nowadays, it seems like that’s not happening as much. And I think COVID did it. I mean, COVID somehow switched something in a lot of people’s brains to say, you know, I’m just going to be here. And I think that combined with the
and your phone and all that kind of stuff kind of traps people a little bit in that thinking. But to go back to the AI thing, the interesting thing that you mentioned and something that I hadn’t really, really processed severely until you mentioned that was, I’m like, well, why don’t you just said, why do my things for this reason? I’m thinking, well, why the heck am I doing my thing? That’s a good question. And I think I’m like, I think I do it for my own self enjoyment, that’s the number one thing on my list. So if I make money, don’t make money, I don’t really care. I do all the things that I do solely to fulfill what I feel like doing. That’s my goal. But the other thing, and this is what your answer sparked in my head was, for me is, and it’s something that actually goes back even further, but the fact that you mentioned it brought it back forward in my head again was,
I do it somewhat for my children in the sense that I want them to know that you can do things that you enjoy. And it doesn’t matter if it’s popular or if it makes a bunch of money or any of that, as long as you enjoy doing it. And so I’ve always for years, I will go golfing. I’m not a golfer. but I will go golfing, especially with friends. Cause it’s a social thing. And I’m, I have gotten no better at golfing my whole life, but I still will go every once in a while, especially if people are like, Hey, let’s go golfing. I’ll be like, yeah, let’s go golfing. I go, just know that I suck and I’m not going to get any better, but I,
I do still enjoy doing it. And I think it’s a combination of the two things. I do enjoy, I obviously enjoy being with the folks that I’m with. Um, but I still enjoy the sport enough, even though I am incredibly, I mean, it’s probably a pain to play with me, uh, especially if you’re any good. Um, but I do still enjoy doing it. And yeah, And I think that’s kind of like the art thing. It’s a situation where it’s like, you know, you just need to, you know, do the things that you want to do no matter what the outcome. I think it’s a good lesson. And I think that kids who get in the rut of thinking that it has to be popular or successful are
Uh, and then they stopped doing it because even though they like it, but they’re like, well, it’s not popular, successful. I got to do something that’s that. I mean, that’s not, I don’t think that’s a good, um, a good message. No, I, and it actually, it affected me on and off in my twenties and thirties because when I would seek professional guidance for help for how to get to the next level I wanted to get to, I would be told your problem. This is, I’ve told this by everyone every year of my life. you do too many things pick one and only do that and then that goes back to what you just said which is that sounds like the worst life ever like i do not wanna i have no envy for um this is a random name i’m gonna pull but like ariana grande who gets paid to like show up to the same place and sing the same songs every night and then she can only release an album that like the entire group around her that makes money off of her like deems worthy of releasing you know like taylor swift right i don’t listen to her but i admire her greatly at this point for
just doing what she wants i like from what i hear she released like an album that a lot of fans like hated and didn’t like and she was like well i don’t care this is like how my career is going you know um that’s like yeah watching people younger than you change in their 30s and 40s is a wonderful funny feeling like it’s cool uh yeah like madonna’s not my contemporary so it was weird watching her as someone younger than her but now i’m talking about taylor swift who’s younger than me by the same difference madonna’s all right yeah i have these like two people showing me two very, you know, and Britney Spears would be from my age group, I guess, except she didn’t really laugh. Well, she, she’s out. I don’t know. So I, you made me think a lot, but, but I do agree, especially with having kids that I’m definitely going to even push that further now, like that you said it with my own life, which is I am, I’m having a great time more than ever making things. And part of it is I’ve stopped like religiously posting on social media and going back to social media and looking to see if it like hooked. Like I, I just,
have stopped paying attention to the outcome. And it really is, like Buddhism says, just no attachment to outcomes is absolutely a peaceful, better way to go through life as an artist, in my opinion. Yeah, no, I think you’re right. I think it’s hard to be… All these metrics are thrown in your face. And then, you know… The funny thing to me is that if… So you get all these things thrown in your face, all these stats, look at all your stats, look at your stats, how many hits, how many downloads, how many whatevers. And you’re like totally focused on that. But if you peel back the curtain a little bit, right? And this is something that was shown to me. Again, I didn’t seek this out so much, but something that was shown to me by somebody else. And if you’re like, okay, well, we’re doing a podcast. So what does it take to be
you know in the um uh top you know podcast or something like that. Right. And it’s funny because there’s, there’s so many and so forth that, I mean, to be in the top 50 you only have to have 100 downloads wow you know what i mean? But I never looked into that because you always are focused on what’s thrown in your face. Right. And everybody’s, and then you hear about the things like, you know, Rogan got a million downloads and all this kind of stuff. But the realities are, are few and far between, right? So out of all of them, in order to even be in the top half, it doesn’t take much. But no one knows that, right? And no one is talking about that necessarily. They’re all talking about the most popular things. And so whenever you’re focused on that, you always feel like you’re not doing enough. But the realities are that
Well, the reality is it doesn’t matter as long as you’re happy doing it. But the other reality is that you don’t have any idea what the strata is, right? What’s the division? And if you happen upon it, then you realize, well, wait a minute. This is all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. And I think that happens a lot in… Other areas, you mentioned that you were in a band and so forth. And I mean, the fact that you even got a gig, you’re probably better than 80% of everybody else out there because you actually got a gig, right? Or you even mentioned that getting your poop in a group so you could get it together to do a song is something. Again, it shoots you to the top. I think we get…
deluded into thinking we’re not good because we’re only here about the people who are at the top of their game. And the media feeds us that constantly and your streams and all that kind of stuff. It’s weird. It is a weird, there’s no, what do you want to call it? There’s no context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I feel very strongly, too, that now more than ever, there’s no context for anything. There’s a lot of… I keep hearing from vague sources I don’t know that everything is going wrong, and then I keep hearing from people I do know that just over and over again, I’m confused. What is going on? What am I supposed to care about? What can I do? And it’s just like…
the state of bamboozlement, which to me is not just like political and not just American. It’s like all over the world and it has to do with AI. There’s this reset of like, it used to be pretty simple. Like where’s my first and second and third meal gonna come from? And if i can’t figure those three things out, nothing else matters. And then i think like there’s so much free time in, in what we call first world countries. And I would even argue second world countries. Um, And there’s something going on with AI because it’s like, people who hate work are scared to lose the work they hate to AI. And I think the reason people are scared is they don’t trust that we have our S together as people to just actually harmoniously use AI and also give food out to people and make it peaceful. I think that they burn food in the Great Depression to keep prices high. That’s a lesson I certainly never forgot, even though I wasn’t alive in the Great Depression. I will never forget
reading grapes of wrath and learning what i learned in my teens about how ruthless and mean right that was and so i do think like when there’s a coming scarcity of like and again scarcity of labor only because ai is going to take white collar jobs and robots with ai are going to take blue collar jobs so it’s like you know um yeah i don’t know that’s yeah and i’m not terrified i’m actually just more i’m a little sad like i i’m using the same word over and over again i’m just like a little sad that uh I see it coming and I really just, it’s the singularity, all this stuff, it’s just coming and it just is. Yeah. Well, and I think, I think this would be my thought because I am, I’m sad as well because we have, you know, the changes seem to be happening quicker. Right. So I had, I had a somewhat similar experience as my parents. Right. There was changes, but,
But, you know, the computers and everything over time there through the 80s and the 90s and so forth that they didn’t have. And it was drastic, but it wasn’t so drastic that it shifted the world as quickly, right? Yeah, totally. But here lately, I mean, here just – if you think about 2000, right? We’re only in 2025. So over the last 25 years, you know, it’s – the shifts have been felt tremendous. Right. And so I feel bad for, you know, kids growing up because they’re feeling these shifts within shorter periods of life. So between the time you think a kid was born in 2000 and it’s now 2025, how different the world is for them. That for me, I didn’t notice it until I was probably in my, you know, a bit later, you know what I mean, by 30 or something. Yeah, yeah, I’m with you. And so, you know, it’s interesting how quickly everything’s happening and the fact that we are still, we have generations of people who aren’t dealing with that who have a certain amount of power. And I don’t want to get too much into politics, but,
because I’m not really a political person. Yeah, no, I’m with you. So they’re not dealing with these changes well at all because they’re not used to them. And so I think that causes a lot of friction and a lot of confusion. And in some ways, a lot of animosity. They want to hold on to their time period and they do things differently. within their power to do so, which then ruin the progress. So it’s a little bit of both, right? It’s a little bit on both ends of the spectrum with the way it’s going. Because to me, we are at a time in history where literally, I think, at least in the area that I live, right? I’m not going to blanket the world with this statement, but in the area, you can easily feed everybody.
you could easily put somebody in a, in a living situation, right? And give them clothes and so forth. And you can easily educate everybody. And yet we don’t that’s it bob this is like like we talk about collaborations and humans. This is it. This is like, it’s so hard to know that so many of us feel this and know this. And yet we really are powerless. Like I don’t, I hate when I, hear accusations that we should or we could do more. It’s really not true. It would be abrasive and rude to just start demanding my way and just start yelling at people, but we have the capability. And again, what you said, where you live is true, but where you live is a model that could be spread out easily with AI and everything else that’s going on. They’ve invented solar planes. We don’t even need to have gasoline to fly ships and supplies. I mean, it’s…
even like a nuclear reactor on like, like our warships are a beacon of environmentalism. Right. The machinations of war are like, yeah. It’s, it’s wild though. If you think about it, I, I, I would say, and it’s, you know, it’s been a few years. I mean, it’s not just happened now. I mean, this has been over the last few years at least that we have all of the tools. We have all of the knowledge and we have all of the pieces and, but we don’t implement them. And if you can imagine, you know, taking this next step, you know, it would be easy, I think, maybe it’s not easy is not the word to use, but it would be possible to do a lot of these things, you know. And, you know, I keep reading that we’re the only industrialized country without some type of healthcare system in place for everybody. And it makes me sad because,
that’s another area that could ease, you know, we could adapt. Right. And I think the problem becomes, you talk about burning food and the depression is because we don’t want to change, you know, the buggy whip people don’t want buggies to go away. And, but there comes a time when that has to happen. And, um, and if we, the longer we wait and don’t make it happen, and then it’s eventually just going to burst free. Um, And it’ll be harder to do that than it will be to do a controlled transition if we do an uncontrolled transition. And just like anything, right? So, I mean, you can take that idea and drag it all the way down to how am I going to get this kid to the car because he doesn’t want to go somewhere. I can grab him and throw him in the car or we can take a little time and work on our strategy
to make going someplace to be enjoyable, um, as opposed to being traumatic. And I think, you know, and I, I’ll tell you, I’ll be honest with you. Cause I get a lot of guff. Cause I use a lot of examples with even in work and so forth with children because, and they’re like, we’re not children. Cause they’re thinking about the children part. I’m thinking about the process part. So, you know, cause everybody’s not going to get along and everybody’s not going to do exactly what you want, but just like children. And so then if you do a process that, and this, you know, goes for little kids all the way up to adults, because we’re all, we don’t really change that much. I mean, let’s be honest. And then you do the process and it makes everybody have a more enjoyable experience. But as soon as I mentioned
then everybody thinks I’m calling them children and then they get mad at me. But that’s not the point of it. The point is to say, you know, there’s processes that we can adapt to make things happen and not get everybody upset. So, you know. I would also add that when you treat adults like children, they behave like children. So either way, it’s going to be a problem because if people keep talking haunting the poor. The poor are going to uprise. It happened in France. It happened in Russia. It happened in Cuba. It happens anytime, anywhere when people are not educated well and angry. I just think it’s a disgraceful mistake to be this pedantic with most of society as the way leadership… When I say this, this is why you and I are similar about politics. I am not talking about one party. I am talking about the collective feeling of people versus power. This antagonistic…
relationship that has clearly it preceded my life it was it was in the vietnam war era with nixon it’s you know it comes in waves and goes but the point is the wave is clearly coming and there is a way to like calm you know and unite and then it’s just it’s right and again i i am not a i’m not a chicken little i don’t think a society is going to fully collapse and we’re going to all kill each other what i do think is going to happen is it’s just going to be like sad like a prolonged um sad, like, loss of, uh, identity and, and, um, concern for your neighbors and and community intimacy intimacy is such an awkward word because people associate it only with, like, sex and and love but intimacy is also what you and i are trying to do, which is, like, let down our guards and, and share our opinions and thoughts and and i i feel no judgment from you and I, I know i’m not judging you, but i am listening to you and thinking and reflecting. I’m not just talking at you and trying to get you to agree with me.
Right, yelling at me. You got to go with me. You got to go with my side. Yeah, yeah. This is the best way. Yeah, no, exactly. And yeah, everybody always talks about every time something negative happens, everybody, oh, society is going to collapse. Society is going to collapse. Believe me, there’s too many people with too much at stake to let society collapse. I mean, in order to get to that point, I think there’d have to be a huge amount of destruction, like a war or some type of cataclysm. And then you’re going to get there. Us amongst ourselves is never going to let it collapse because everybody has got too much skin in the game to let it all fall apart. Now, if there’s a giant tsunami that wipes out half of the United States or something, then yeah, I’d probably feel that way.
That’s the only thing that’s – we get the asteroids hitting us or something. That’s the only thing that’s going to really make a difference in that equation. Yeah. But I think kind of let’s loop back to our art conversation a little bit with AI and so forth. I think that there’s always a pendulum. Everything that happens typically has the arc of a pendulum. So it starts – know there’s it’s nowhere to be seen and it comes into view and then it’s too much and then it works its way back and eventually it evens out. And I think that’s what’s going to happen with AI. Yes, there are going to be some changes and yes, they’re going to be difficult changes for a while. But I think overall, eventually it’s going to even out into where, you know, in 10 years or something, 20 years,
you’re going to look them back and think, oh, why was everybody all worried about this? It’s made my life so much better. Yeah, yeah. That’s something that people are so quick to dismiss is like, I would love more free time and I would love an assistant to do a lot of the mundane. You know, before we came on, I was typing curiously. That was stuff my AI assistant would easily be doing for me. It was like corresponding, not like in a heartfelt way. Like I wasn’t writing an old friend with a catch-up letter. I was literally just, you know, dotting some T uh, some eyes and crossing T’s and stuff. And like, so yeah, people keep, you know, you have kids, I have kids. Um, people are really naive of talking about how, how easily children are duped. I think it’s the opposite. I don’t think kids are going to be duped by AI. I think they’re going to grow with it. Um, yeah, I don’t know. I am not pessimistic or down on AI. I am pessimistic and down on the intersection of,
peak capitalism and and early ai so like just this like you said just a little period um and i’m down on it because i’m an artist and i’m uh i’m a i like going outside i like touching grass i like you know that’s all yeah well that that’s interesting because um if you think about it, right, and i don’t know if you’re like star trek or or or i think star trek is a little bit more of a better example for our societal than star wars necessarily. yeah um so star trek you They had all these cool things. You could talk to computer. You could tell the computer to do some computations for you that you can’t do in your head and all this kind of stuff. And everybody loved it. Right. And then the fact that basically society in that futuristic show had turned a corner and it turned a corner to be where everything is provided for us. Right. There’s no talk of wages in Star Trek.
Yeah. Captain Kirk never said, gosh, I wish I could get a raise. Right. Everybody, you know, they basically they didn’t work for money. They worked for to do more. So if you wanted to be a captain, you had to put in the time, which you have to do now. But there’s this component of money that’s part of the equation. Right there. There’s no component of money. Right. Because you’re all taken care of. You’re all fed. You get the replicator. You can have whatever you want. And, and so forth. And then there’s no, um, uh, the only time money came into star trek was in deep space Nine, I think with the uh uh latinum with the, um, uh, the alien race, the Ferengi. They were the only ones. And that’s the first time i can remember money being in the star trek universe.
Otherwise, you always just try to do your best and you wanted to attain another rank, which means you did better than somebody else in this skill set. And so it was all about achievement through, you know, personal doing the work, doing the personal building yourself as a person, as opposed to I got to, you know, make a couple more bucks. So, yeah, to me, that is fascinating to look back on it. Yet we like that. we have something going on that is, is kind of pushing us in a direction like that. And we’re like, Oh, wait a minute. I don’t want to do that. Yeah. You know, I don’t want to talk to the computer and have it talk to me. Um, you know, well, I think, um, the only pushback in my head to our side of this, cause I am with you completely. And I remember as a kid, I really actually remember a Star Trek, um, blowing my mind because it actually had like,
Asians and black people and like I’m talking about the 60s one and like that was like mind-blowing to me as a kid because there was no other program with that I mean we had the Cosby show but that was a new show so this was like and I remember like to boldly go and I remember the movie version like actually thinking about it like and be like oh wow this the premise of this show is peace like like it was just like mind-blowing as I was because I was growing up like we said in the Cold War but the other thing the other pushback in my life as and it’s from the same era is the famous haunting end scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey where people have lied to Dave about why he’s on the mission. So that’s the first thing that reminds me of current society. We would do that. We would totally lie to people. And then he’s horrified when he finds out that he doesn’t know where he’s going or have any control. And then Hal is in control. And then it’s just this pivotal scene where you can see why we should have AI regulating pipes and water and nuclear reaction stuff, but there also should be
always be a human who’s actually above it. And that’s the missing link that I think a lot of people who are smart are worried about is oversight. And here’s my thing. And everybody, you know, even with technology, current technology that’s not sentient or have any intelligence at all, I’m like, you can pull the plug. Yeah, yeah. They’re dependent on you to feed them energy. And somewhere… You know where that energy comes from. So you can hit the breaker. You can, you know, pull the plug. You can cut a wire. I mean, everybody seems to forget that. You know what I mean? It’s like, you know. Well, there’s Boston Dynamics is working really hard to put a monkey wrench in that, which is they want to have these like lithium battery packs on like robot soldiers. So the problem, it’s always the machinations of war. It’s always the like. Right.
Do you watch Black Mirror before I go off on a… Yeah, no, I haven’t seen all of it, but yeah, I have seen parts of it. You’ve seen the robot dog one by chance? It’s where these people stumble on a factory that’s been shut down and it’s after a cataclysmic war and they don’t know it, but there’s all these basically picture Boston Dynamics robot dogs and stuff that are terrifyingly good at finding humans and killing them. And because of battery technology, they can’t pull a plug. so the whole time for the show, and again, I’m not, you know me well enough to know i’m not saying you’re wrong at all the only thing that does scare me is boston dynamics and the pentagon working together behind all our backs and just sure you know yeah yeah but but i mean if you had uh the means, I mean, there’s nothing nothing greater than a bullet going through a lithium battery.
to ruin your day. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced one catching fire, but they have little thin layers of material to keep it from combusting. That’s why you see all these videos where phones go up in flames and so forth because all that gets compromised. The funny thing is you would think, and this is another one of these weird tangents here, but Humans keep surviving even though we’re very fragile. Yeah, yeah. Right? But all these other things that are created are just as fragile. It’s just we build them up a little bit in our minds to think that they’re invincible, which maybe, I mean, in ways they can be invincible, right? And they don’t sleep and they don’t need to eat and they don’t need to drink anything like we do. And so that makes them a little bit fragile.
more adept at doing certain things, just like the reason AI can compute way faster than we can. And that’s what makes it fascinating and amazing, right? But the reality is there’s always an Achilles heel on everything. And the great thing about humans is we’re incredibly adaptable. And for whatever reason, we’ve been fantastic at finding those Weaknesses. Because we find them in each other constantly and we find them in everything around us, right? We exploit all the weaknesses. The reason we have a society that we do today is we’ve exploited every weakness that we could in nature and uh and everything around us right um and so you know, I don’t see why that wouldn’t continue um to do so. And, you know one of the robot dogs could be waterproof to a point, but Hey, maybe he can’t swim in water for a half an hour like you can. And then there’s the end of that. Right. So, um, all of it, uh, you know, it’s all really fascinating to think about in that, in that way is, you know, um, I’ve always, um, kind of gets back to a thing, um,
that I always tell my kids, you know, you always feel like I’m getting stuck in a position or I’m stuck in doing something, or I feel stuck in, in this. And I’m like, you always have a choice every time, no matter what the situation, no matter what you’re doing, remember, you always have a choice. And that choice is to leave that choice is to stop, right? Yes. There’s going to be consequences, right? But that is always your choice. You don’t have to stay there, um, If you are willing to accept the consequences of the choice to leave. And the other thing was, you know, and it’s weird, the kids don’t always think about this because it’s a lot of rules in place for everybody. And at one point in time, you know, there’s discussions at school and so forth about, you know, if there’s a fire in your house, what will you do and everything? And I told, you know, my kids, I’m like, if there is a fire in the house, you throw whatever you want through that window and get out of here.
They’re like, I can break the window? Yeah. If there’s a fire in the house, they’re going, go to these exits and everything. I’m like, I go, whenever there’s certain situations where rules apply to nothing. And so you just have to make the decision. Am I in a situation where the rules don’t apply and you do whatever you need to do to get yourself out of that situation? And it was almost to me like, when I told them it was like in their eyes, they’re like, Oh my gosh, I can break a window. Yeah. And I’m like, well, only if you’re in the situation. Um, before that there was, it was like a realization and they’re like before they would have never in a million years thought to break the window because you’re not supposed to break windows. And I’m like, no, just break the window. You know, why would you wait? You’re such a good dad because it’s such a preoccupation and, and somewhat of a fear of mine that, um,
people can be too obeying. Like they can’t understand what exactly you’re talking about. And it reminds me of, so when Gene Hackman passed away, I decided to watch a couple of my favorite movies of his as kind of like a trivia, you know, I just really liked him as an actor. So I rewatched The Unforgiven and I didn’t realize that that movie, like the premise is Clint Eastwood tells his two little kids, hey, I’m leaving for like God knows how long. If something goes wrong, go down three miles down the road and find that woman you kind of know and she’ll help you. and then he just leaves and it’s like this daughter and this son and they’re like so young and it’s on the frontier. And like, I was just like laughing because i was like, God, we are like, you can’t even like leave your kid in a car anymore. Like when i was like, my parents would leave me in a car for like an hour and a half at a freaking shopping mall, like in like a parking lot in the sun. And like, you know, they’re like, it was electric windows. You couldn’t even get the window like more than the crack they’d leave it. And it was just like, so it’s just funny. because I do, I think, um,
that’s an absurd thing to do to children is to take away any of their like discovery and you know and like my friend’s kid almost died in a creek the other day with all his friends oh no idiot it was yeah it was like the creek was frozen over and and the kids like oh they were walking yeah and they all thought and like and one of them fell and um the only reason that he didn’t die is because the kids weren’t actually cowards and they actually understood like we need to get down and help him out but i know like a I’m going to get in trouble. Like I shouldn’t, or like we should just run and like leave this person or, you know, the old, uh, drop your friend off at the hospital versus what if the police find out and we’re going to get in trouble? No, take your friend to the hospital. That’s right. And I mean, and heroin and any other drugs, like just like, oh, and that’s, you know, so all this is related to me, this idea of like, uh, break in an emergency, you know, that’s. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have, you know, we have polite society and then we have emergencies and emergencies are different.
And and you need that. I think the the problem is, is that to me, at least, is that people don’t you’re not using you’re using the rules over your own brain. And yeah, you’re you’re going to know what is you need to do. And then you just have to make the decision. Yes, it’s serious enough for me to do it. And you don’t have don’t think about the rules. Don’t think about anything. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Who cares? Who cares? as long as you, you know, survive to the next thing, that’s the important part, right? And that, you know, it just, to me, I think there’s so much rule enforcement, perhaps, that makes people fear that it’s overkill. And, you know, we just need to say, you know, you need to know the difference and you know the difference. And at a certain point in your life, you,
you, uh, you just know, right. You’ve given it enough exposure to know. And like, if you have somebody falls in that you need to do what you need to do to, to get them out, you know, if there’s more than one, want somebody run for help while we try to help. And that way you’ve got, you know, you’re it’s, it’s problem solving skills, right? Yeah. That’s what it is. It’s as simple as that. And unfortunately, I don’t think, I think we, this gets into education. Now we do too much to, push the, you know, um, uh, the normal answers and not enough to say, okay, you know, something chaotic just happened. What do you do? And there’s, there’s no, not a lot of, of that kind of learning going on. It’s a little bit more, you know, fact learning as opposed to situational learning. And I think, and I always talk about abstract learning, right? You have to have a lot of abstract, um,
learning. And some people are so concrete that they don’t, they don’t get the abstract part where you have to really think beyond. So, you know, you talk about that situation in the creek, you know, have, if you have more than one person, one person runs for adults, another person helps, you know, that maybe the ice is thin. So maybe you get a branch, you put the branch out there first, because you know, if I go out on the ice, I’m going to fall in. I mean, but But we don’t get these situational, you know, abstract thinking skills as much as I think we used to, perhaps, because it’s the environment has been made so safe that you never have to do that. Yeah. And there’s also like heuristical models and use of heuristics, like AI is becoming a heuristic in itself and a heuristic for anyone listening, just because it sounds more fancy than it is. It’s just simply…
Like, the multiplication table, like, just memorizing eight times eight is 64 is it was different than saying eight plus eight plus eight plus eight plus eight plus eight plus eight is 64. so heuristics are convenient because they save us time, but in the example of, like, the fire, you know, the rule is you’re never allowed to leave the house because you’re under four and you’re not allowed to right front door. Well, in a fire, it’s the complete opposite. All those rules are off like right so so an ai to me, my fear of ai as a uh my fear okay like my friend who designs chips for amd once told me, I can’t design a chip. He said, all I can do is run this complicated program that I spent relentless years in college as an engineer learning that then tells the machine how to make the chip. And meanwhile, the blueprint for the chip was made by someone else who doesn’t know how to do what I do. And so he’s explaining that like the supply chain of making chips for everything we use is there’s almost no one on Earth who knows how to actually do it all, like who could take silicone and create a chip and then blah, blah, blah. But back in the 50s and the 60s, especially in Silicon Valley,
uh, you know, people were making their own computers. They were experimenting with using things. And like, so, and people used to, you know, repair a whole radio. Like you could go. So I, yeah, I’m worried about AI as a heuristic for everything. Like not even knowing how to like brush your teeth because AI moves the toothbrush in the right direction. That’s right. You know what I mean? Like, so, but you know, that’s interesting because yeah, that, that’s one of those things. And, uh, people, um, I’m trying to think there was, movie. I’m blanking on that. But anyway, you know, well, how could, how could like, oh, there was something in the sci-fi movie where they had faster than light technology, but they didn’t know how to do simple tasks. And they’re like, how did that happen? It’s like, it’s easy how it happens because eventually the average person gets so removed from the technology, like these phones, right? We talked about phones earlier. I can’t make a phone, right? I used to,
as kind of a hobby kind of thing, I could work on your regular old bell telephone. I could take it apart and put it back together. This kind of phone, I can’t do that, right? And eventually we get the average, it gets to be more and more of an elite skill to the point where if all of those people with that elite skill were wiped out, you would have no idea how to make that phone. And we have so many things like that, right? Everybody talks about cars are getting so complicated that, You know, you can’t fix them yourself. Now you’re pushing that into an elite skill. Right. And so everything can happen like that. And then if something were to come about that would were to wipe out all those folks with that knowledge, then how would you, you know, get that? Where would that knowledge come from? It had to be reinvented at that point. They say some people that that is what the Library of Alexandria did.
is that it’s set back humanity by like hundreds of years. And they say, people predict that there’s been many examples of that where like society has just crushed information. Yeah, it’s interesting. I think about this a lot, especially the, as a kid, I used to take everything apart. My parents would get so annoyed. I would like take a phone, unscrew it. And I remember like, you know, and I made like an intercom once and I was like, I probably, it’s the most proud I’ve ever been of myself. Probably that, like that. And I remember it took like, four weeks. Like, I kept experimenting and, like, taking things apart and, like, trying different things. And, yeah, so it’s, um Yeah, the not being able to fix a car, the fact that like uh also they this ties into, like, mechanics want to make money and um and so do car companies. So, like, I drive a hyundai with, like, a fancy computer. Most of the like mom and pop shops i actually want to use cannot help me with my car when a certain thing goes wrong. And it’s very frustrating because the hyundai place, because of covid
had wait times of three and a half months. Um, and so I was in this rock hard place situation that was so frustrating during COVID where I couldn’t actually get a basic, basic thing done on my car. Um, and it, you know, it just made me think about where we’re headed. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s wild. I mean that, and that’s, that’s a negative to it all. Right. So, um, yeah. And I mean, that gets into feeds back into the capitalism thing that you mentioned earlier and so forth. how it all kind of ties together because they obviously want to keep their corner in that market, right? So they don’t want to just give it all away. But at some point, I think we have to think beyond all that. We have to think about how do we sustain ourselves beyond this ideology, right? This concept, because it’s eventually going to go…
i mean, if we continue on on our um trajectory all this is going to change and all of it’s going to go away and um and so we’re going to be on something else, because really, if you think about it and this is one of those, you know, one of those things, we’re really only about 150 years into this model 150 years ago. Yes, there was money. There’s always been money way back in the Roman times and everything, but it’s not been like this. And you know what I mean? And people aren’t doing things the same way. And so the modern age, you know, which started with the kind of the industrial revolution of things is not that old. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah. And it changed from an agrarian kind of thing to,
to what it is now. I mean, the big buildings and everything, and you still see the buildings from the 20s, which was when buildings got bigger, right? It was around 1910, 1920, and so forth. And that was helped along because of the economic factors of those times that didn’t have that before then. And so, yeah, I mean, and so we’re working our way into the next thing. And we have to be ready to do that. We didn’t even brush on the other final part of all this conversation, which is there’s a declining rate of relationships, there’s a declining rate of birth, and there’s a declining rate of sex, especially among young people, which is mind-blowing to this not-young person. In addition to all that, they are now developing chatbots that agree with you when you want it to, disagree when you don’t want it to, and then you can turn that on and off.
And then on top of that, Japan has invented synthetic skin and robotics that are the real thing. So what do you think is coming? What’s coming is why on earth would you put up with… I mean, my wife would admit this and I would admit this. If I was a lot younger, I don’t know if I would want to be in a real marriage the way you and I have experienced it, the way most people have, because that adversity is challenging and hard. I don’t think relationships are hard. I’m not saying anything condemning about it. What I am saying is if you had the option of a beautiful… never aging robot that compliments your personality exactly how you want. And then when you’re bored of that, you can change its personality. I’m actually worried for young people. I don’t think they have the understanding of like the palpable human expression of love and how different that is from sex with a robot, you know? Yeah. That’s weird. But the joke in our house is that if either one of us were to pass away or something, my, my,
wife or myself. The other one would be like, are we going to get remarried? No, this is it. We’re done. We’re good to stay together for this period and so forth, but we’re not going to venture into new territory. This is it. It’s the same thing when my wife’s like, I would never cheat on my wife because that’s such a hassle. Exactly. Right. Well, what’s the point? Yeah. There’s no point. And it was just like, no, I don’t. Yeah. Yeah. My wife was long and arduous and I loved her and I love doing it, but Oh my God, I don’t want to like, I’m out. Exactly. I’m like, yeah, I’d be fine. I mean, I’d be sad, but I’d be fine. Yeah. Well, thanks Mike. I know you got other stuff to get onto today. I want to thank you very much for taking the time. Is it, and I’ve got your website on the, on the board here. Anything else you want to give us parting thoughts? Yeah. I would just say to anyone listening young or old or same age as us,
you know, don’t give up uh no matter what it is that you’re about to give up on. I don’t care what it is. Just don’t give up. Give it another day because i do think hope springs eternal and there’s just so much negativity and dismissiveness and what’s popular is fighting and arguing and negativity, but you know what you like. You like camaraderie and good spirit and good time so just try to not give up on other people and yourself and whatever it is that’s bothering you there you go words to live by. Thanks, Mike. And until the next time, we meet again. All right. Hold on for just a second.
